For those waiting for government, a labeling rule which would require packages to provide cooking instructions for the mechanically tenderized meat, had to be finalized by Dec. 31 in order for it to take effect before 2018 under separate requirements of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Philip Brasher writes in Agri-Pulse that FSIS first proposed the labeling for mechanically tenderized meat in June 2013 out of concern that consumers aren’t cooking the meat properly to eliminate pathogens. The meat is tenderized with knives and needles that can drive bacteria inside the product.

However, the meat industry strongly opposes the labeling requirement and USDA officials did not send the final rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review until Nov. 21. The regulation remains pending at OMB. Under FSIS labeling regulations, the labeling rule could have taken effect as soon as 2016 only if it had been cleared by OMB and approved by USDA by Dec. 31.

The meat industry has argued that the meat doesn’t pose a significant risk and that the special cooking instructions aren’t warranted. In comments filed with FSIS in October 2013, the American Meat Institute said that antimicrobial measures instituted by processors assure that the meat is safe.

The Costco label says the meat should be cooked to an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Corbo said the final FSIS rule is likely to offer consumers an option to the 160-degree minimum: Cook the meat to 145 degrees and let it stand for least three minutes. The meat will continue to cook internally for the three minutes even though it is no longer on the heat source.

Food safety types are pressuring the Obama administration to finalize a rule before the year ends that will require meat packers to label beef that is mechanically tenderized.

The Center for Foodborne Illness (CFI) Research & Prevention said if the U.S. Department of Agriculture labeling rule is not published by Dec. 31, it won’t be implemented until January 2018 due to Food Safety and Inspection Service uniform compliance date requirements for labeling meat and poultry products.

Mechanically tenderized products like steaks and roasts are repeatedly pierced by small needles or blades, which the group says increases the risk of pathogens located on the surface of the product being transferred to the interior.

From 2003 to 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received reports of five foodborne illnesses attributable to needle- or blade-tenderized beef products prepared in restaurants and consumers’ homes.

The rules would require the labels to display cooking instructions so consumers have the information they need to properly destroy pathogens.

Health Minister Rona Ambrose on Thursday announced the new labelling requirements for all uncooked MTB — expanding a rule that’s been in place since July last year for federally licensed beef plants producing steaks and roasts.

The new label must clearly state the beef being sold is “mechanically tenderized,” and must include instructions for safe cooking, stressing the importance of cooking MTB to a minimum internal temperature of 145 F (63 C) and turning over steaks at least twice during cooking.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is tasked with verifying retailers’ and packers’ labels meet the new requirements, Health Canada said.

Mechanical tenderization is a common practice for improving beef tenderness and flavour, using needles or blades to break down, penetrate or pierce the meat’s surface and disrupt the muscle fibers, or to inject the meat with a marinade or tenderizer.

Normally, the risk of E. coli contamination from a rare or undercooked steak, roast or other solid cut of beef is “not a significant concern” since such bacteria would normally be on the surface of the meat and “inactivated” during cooking.

Much like grinding beef, mechanical tenderization can increase the potential for bacteria to transfer from the surface to the centre of the meat.

Unlike ground beef, however, as a Health Canada health risk assessment pointed out last year, it’s “not necessarily apparent by just looking at a mechanically tenderized meat product that it has undergone this process.”

The May 2013 assessment showed “a five-fold increase in risk from MTB products when compared to intact cuts of beef.”

Health Canada noted that in 2012, out of 18 cases of foodborne E. coli O157-related illness from a Canadian outbreak linked to contaminated beef, five cases were considered to be “likely associated with the consumption of beef that had been mechanically tenderized at the retail level.”

The rule covers all solid cuts of MTB, regardless of thickness, which means it will also apply to cubed steaks, “fast fry” or “minute” steaks. It will apply to both pre-packaged and non-pre-packaged products.

MTB that’s packaged on the premises at selection or purchase — such as in a butcher shop or at a clerk-served meat counter — will need to be identified as such before the customer selects a desired cut of beef. An in-store sign would identify a product in a display case as “mechanically tenderized,” for example.

In those cases, once meat has been packaged to give to the customer, the product must carry both the mandatory “mechanically tenderized” label and safe cooking instructions on the “principal display panel.”

The American Meat Institute has submitted comments recommending that USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) withdraw its proposed rule requiring labeling on needle- or blade-tenderized beef products.

“The existing labeling scheme for products that have been needle injected or blade tenderized, with appropriate qualifying statements or other label information, provides open and transparent information based on recognizable common and usual product names and should be kept,” the comments say.

The comments highlight, among other things, the safety record of mechanically tenderized (MT) products, as well the proposed rule’s potential to confuse consumers by changing the product name to include the mechanically tenderized distinction.

The UK Food Standards Agency is full of food safety contradictions: cook meat until it is piping hot; wash watercress to avoid E. coli; and, pink steaks are safe.

Back in August, according to the Daily Mail, district judge Elizabeth Roscoe ruled that London-based Davey’s could continue to serve rare beefburgers, rejecting claims they were a health risk.

“There is a balance to be struck between ensuring the safety of the public and allowing them the freedom of choice that they would wish and have a right to expect.”

The council wanted Davy’s beef supplier to sear and shave the outside of whole cuts of meat to remove any harmful bugs.

Davy’s argued that its suppliers could be trusted to supply beef that could be safely eaten.

But Westminster council’s food safety chief James Armitage, “We are not saying burgers should not be eaten rare or medium – merely that they should be prepared in a way that makes them as safe as practicably possible.”

What are those controls?

Before the judge’s ruling, the Daily Mail published a bit about how FSA was going to advise that all meat be cooked until no pink remained.

Steak is safe to eat ‘rare’. Whole cuts of beef or lamb, steaks, cutlets and joints only have germs on the outside, so as long as the outside is cooked any potentially harmful germs that could cause food poisoning will be killed.”

Not quite.

Steaks that have been needle tenderized have the albeit-low potential for pathogens to be entered into the meat, and requiring a higher cooking temperature.

I spent the last two hours doing my annual talk and chat session with summer public health students, invoking in them the capacity to care; public health ain’t glamorous, but it matters.

Contrary to what Kansas State University admin types may think, the stagecoaches manage to run through Brisbane at 1 a.m.

Somehow I also managed to comment on needle tenderized beef, while not physically in Manhattan (the Kansas version) even though I’ve been there the majority of the last four months.

And I made a hockey analogy.

I even had a guy visit me at the house yesterday to talk food safety, and he asked me to show him a hockey puck.

I did.

Elizabeth Weise writes in USA Today today that after years of food-safety concerns and at least five outbreaks of illness, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is proposing that mechanically tenderized meat — 26% of all the beef sold in the USA — be labeled as such and that labels include cooking instructions.

Tenderizing meat mechanically involves forcing hundreds of tiny blades or needles through it to break up muscle fibers and make it more tender.

Unfortunately, it can also drive pathogens that might be on the surface, such as E. coli O157:H7, deep into the cut’s interior, where cooking may not kill them. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been five E. coli outbreaks attributed to mechanically tenderized beef, sickening 174 people. Four died.

It’s impossible to tell just by looking that a cut of meat has undergone mechanical tenderization, said USDA Undersecretary Elisabeth Hagen.

“When people buy cube steak, you see the marks where the machinery has cubed up the steak,” Hagen said. “When people buy ground beef, they know they’re getting ground product. But when people order this product, they don’t know. And certainly, when people are ordering in a restaurant, they don’t know they’re ordering this product.”

She added, “A lot of people want a medium-rare steak. But if folks knew that the steak they’re buying might not be what they think it is, and might be in a higher risk category,” they might want it well done.

Some stores do label the product. Costco labels mechanically tenderized beef it sells as “blade tenderized.”

Until now, the USDA hadn’t required producers to label mechanically tenderized meat so consumers know what they’re buying. The new rules, to be announced Thursday, would require that mechanically tenderized products be labeled. The labels would include cooking instructions.

Hagen said mechanically tenderized meat should be cooked to an internal temperature of at least 145 degrees, then allowed to sit for at least three minutes after it is taken off the heat to insure any potential pathogens are killed.

Canada has rules in the works to require labeling of mechanically tenderized meat. Last October, an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 linked to meat processor XL Foods sickened 18 people and led to the country’s largest beef recall, almost 2.5 million pounds of meat. Some of it was mechanically tenderized.

Some food-safety specialists aren’t sure labeling would make much difference.

“We can’t get people to use thermometers on steaks. Why would they do it for needle-tenderized meat?” said Doug Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan.

Cooking blade-tenderized meat to 145 degrees, the temperature required to kill E. coli, would “turn it into a hockey puck,” Powell said. “Why would someone pay the premium for steak or roast and then turn it into a hockey puck?”

The changes follow an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 last fall that sickened 18 people. Contaminated product was produced at XL Foods of Alberta and led to the largest meat recall in Canadian history. Several of those sickened were thought to have consumed needle-tenderized product (with this technique, outside becomes inside, like hamburger, so should be cooked to 165F for safety reasons; I don’t know anyone that spends on the expense of a roast and then cooks to 165F).

Ritz said, “Canada has a world-class food safety system and our Government is committed to taking real steps to make it even stronger.”

“Can we guarantee there’ll never be anymore (outbreaks)? No. Anybody that tells you you can is lying to you. It wouldn’t matter how much money, how many people you have on the lines, there’s too many moving parts to guarantee an absolute. But at the end of the day, we want to take every precaution we can.”

Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society, writes in the Montreal Gazette that you have probably never heard of André Jaccard, but if you eat meat, you have likely benefitted from his invention, although some would argue that the term “benefitted” has to be qualified. What cannot be argued is that back in the 1970s, Jaccard revolutionized an industry by patenting his meat-tenderizing machine!

Tough meat is a tough sell. And what makes for tough meat? An abundance of collagen, the robust protein that makes up what is generally referred to as “connective tissue.” To make meat more tender, collagen has to be disrupted either chemically or physically. Moist cooking for a long time will do this, as will aging, marinating in an acid solution or treatment with a plant enzyme such as papain, extracted from papaya. But collagen can also be degraded by grinding, pounding, or “jaccarding.”

Jaccard’s invention was a machine that tenderizes meat by piercing it with a series of needles and razor-sharp blades that surgically shred the connective tissue and thereby, at least according to the manufacturer’s claim, make any cut of meat “butter tender.” “Jaccarding” also allows more complete penetration of marinades and reduces shrinkage and cooking times. It is easy to see why such mechanically tenderized meat appeals to suppliers, retailers, caterers and restaurants. After all, it means being able to satisfy palates with cheaper cuts. But it may also mean exposing diners to some nasty microbes, such as the notorious E. coli O157: H7.

Roughly half of all cattle shed E. coli O157: H7 in their feces, and then end up contaminating their hides as they romp through the muck in feedlots. When their hides are stripped off after slaughter, the bacteria can be transferred to the underlying meat. Similar transfer can occur through removal of bacteria-tainted entrails. Should the contaminated meat then be ground, the bacteria can become distributed throughout. But not everyone who became sick from meat that originated in the XL plant ate hamburgers; some apparently became ill after eating roasts or steaks. This caused suspicion to be cast on jaccarded meat, given that the process can drive bacteria from surface deep into the tissues, where they may survive, especially if the meat is consumed rare.

Meat that has been tenderized in this fashion is not easy to identify, since the holes made by piercing seal up and vanish. If jaccarded cuts were labelled, as is now being considered, people who buy meat would at least be alerted to making sure that an internal temperature of 70 degrees is reached. Of course, it would be more difficult to know with absolute certainty with meat consumed in restaurants, hotels or catered events.

Something that slipped under my psychedelic radar was a story by CTV in Montreal about the risks of needle tenderized beef.

Most people know to cook ground beef well, but there are other cuts of beef that can also make you sick.

“My pan is nice and warm, and you see the heat is starting to penetrate the steak,” Chef Daniel Trottier says as he grills up some thick steaks. “My pleasure for this steak is rare, rare to mid-rare.”

Trottier is very careful not to let too much heat get in the meat. There’s nothing rare about people who like it the same way.

But beef lovers beware: Not all cuts should be cooked this way and it may surprise you why. Over 20 per cent of Canadian beef has been mechanically tenderized. It’s a process that uses blades or needles to make some cuts of meat easier to chew. However, most don’t even know that they’re eating it.

Christina Friesen teaches butchery at the Pearson School of Culinary Arts. She sometimes uses a mechanical tenderizer. It’s usually done on lesser quality cuts of beef.

“It’s all about profitability. If we didn’t have the pickers to tenderize this, it would go to ground. That’s a lot of meat going into ground. It’s to make profit,” said Friesen.

Dr. Joe Schwarcz has a more direct way of putting it: “You can basically make lower quality meat behave as if it were higher quality meat.”

It may be tender and cheap, but it could pose a risk to your health.

Microbiologist Rick Holley says if there iE. coli on the surface of the meat, tenderizing could push it into the centre.

“What that translates to is that the overall risk associated with foodborne illness from intact mechanically tenderized meat products is about two-fold higher,” said Holley, who teaches at the University of Manitoba.

Last September, 18 people got sick after eating beef contaminated with e-coli that came from Alberta’s Xl Foods—five of them after eating mechanically tenderized beef.

“There is an additional risk associated with mechanical tenderization that allows the bacteria to get into the middle of the stuff,” said Holley.

“It’s also possible for the needles to become contaminated as you go from steak to steak to steak and you pick up bacteria from one steak and transfer it to another one,” Schwarcz continued.

Public health authorities aren’t sure if the tenderizing process was directly responsible for the five cases in Alberta. They’re still investigating.

Not warning consumers

In its investigation, CTV Montreal found only one major retailer, Costco, that’s gone the distance and included instructions on how to safely cook this meat.

Metro’s tenderized French roast has big bold print that says “all cooked – all good,” but there’s no advice on what that means. Same thing at Provigo, it just says “tenderized.”

Quebec’s major grocery chains declined our request for an interview, but say they’re abiding by Health Canada’s recommendation. Still, without clear guidelines, many beef eaters seem to be letting their taste buds make the decisions.